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T. Blankley “Save our troops…

…I am not arguing that we could not win a theoretical war in Afghanistan. But this particular war is being fought without sufficient resources, without a strategy than can remotely succeed and, most unfortunately, with at least one eye on our domestic politics, rather than both eyes on victory.

Regarding resources, the strategy calls for us to deny sanctuary to the enemy such that al-Qaida could not get back in the country safely. Yet even with the surge troops, we cannot occupy any but the most populous areas — so even if we succeed in our current efforts (which we are not doing), we will not be executing our strategy for want of troops.

Regarding the strategic failure, the premise of this war as currently being run is that we turn everything over to our Afghan government army and policy, who will be capable of maintaining whatever successes our troops will have achieved. This is laughable.

As virtually any troops or officers recently back from Afghanistan will tell you, the number of troops and police being recruited, trained and kept in service is pathetically short of targets.

Moreover, most of them won’t fight. The idea that they will be ready to take over in 2011 or even 2014 is just not in the cards. And yet that is our strategic exit strategy.

Finally, it is apparent that the strategy of this war has been fatally tainted by domestic political calculation. This proposition was unambiguously described by Woodward in his recent book "Obama’s War…"

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3 thoughts on “T. Blankley “Save our troops…”

“the number of troops and police being recruited, trained and kept in service is pathetically short of targets.”

This isn’t Afghanistan’s fault. A record number of Afghans want to join the ANSF; more than the number of vacancies.

The problem is that the ANA Training Command and ANP training command are far too under funded and under resourced. There are far too few training seats at any given time.

Even with substantial Pakistani help for the Taliban, they can still be beaten if the ANATC, ANPTC and ANSF in general are resourced enough.

The largest PR problem that ISAF confronts in Afghanistan is the widely held conspiracy theory that ISAF backs the Taliban against the GIRoA and Afghans.

Karzai also apparently believes that ISAF is purposely keeping him, his government and ANSF weak. He also blames ISAF for why Iran, Russia and India are not allowed to help him defeat the Taliban.

“Moreover, most of them won’t fight.” To falsely accuse the ANA, NDS and ANCOP of that is wrong. They do fight. The problem is that they haven’t been trained and educated enough to prepare, plan and organize before they fight.

As of right now, the entire ANA has only trained less than 300 officers for more than 20 weeks. Is it any wonder the ANA think ISAF is backing the Taliban against them?